Before turning
south across the bridge to the Redlands, the parkway snakes between the
river and a wasteland of rubble bill-boarded with promises of professional spa
installation, exceptional dental care and relief from DUI charges. Leonard sees
a ladder-racked pickup coming up on his right, racing to pass before the road
narrows to two lanes. The truck bed is overloaded with yard waste, paint
buckets and miscellaneous unbagged trash that flits in the slipstream coming
off the back. Leonard’s in no hurry, but the reckless move irritates him and he
holds his place against being overtaken. The driver takes some shoulder before
squeezing in at the curve, spinning a salvo of gravel across Leonard’s grille.
Through their back window he can see two yahoos bobbing their heads toward each
other in celebration of the maneuver. Let
it go, he tells himself, just as the driver swerves again only to jolt over
an unseen obstacle, sending up a shower of debris. Leonard feels the thump,
too, just as flapping newspapers burst in a flock from the truck bed, twist and plaster themselves across his windshield.

He ducks down to an opening where he can see to cross
the bridge and pull safely aside. By the time he steps out to a clear view of
the road, the offenders have disappeared over the rise. He strips off the
newspaper and mashes it into a ball. How long has it been since he even glanced
at the news? Another habit that slid away with Inetta. Behind him, on the
bridge, a stray tire bedevils the traffic. He considers walking back to clear
it, but the spot is blind and there’s no pedestrian walk on that side of the
bridge. Let someone with a cell phone call it in. He’s spent a year shrinking
his attention down to a pinhole, and with it, his sense of obligation to clean
up after the careless.

Time was, he took on such chores without thinking,
hauling strangers out of ditches, offering gas to stranded tourists, snugging
up a neighbor’s sagging fence. That was how it was out here. You made your
contribution to mutual survival—no recognition or recompense expected. Cowboy
karma, he’d heard somebody call it. Inetta might call it grace. But for all that, what did such steadfastness do for his mother and his
sister kneeling in the yard. Abner, alone and facedown in his field. Vaughn
bent sideways for good. Junior banished and then tumbling through space. Inetta
herself, slow walking away from him. No matter what Leonard Self decides about
his importance in the universe, if he turns his back on this, the tire will
still be off the bridge tomorrow and no one will even remember it was there. He
wishes he could talk it out with Inetta, hear again why it matters not to let
things slide. He used to step up without thinking on it because simple goodness needed a place to
lodge, entrusted closer to the real world than with an all-loving and do-nothing God.

He thinks of his own father, for the first time in a
long while without feeling a strangle in his throat. Had Leonard’s sense of
rightness only been the offspring of his father’s crime, or had he inherited
good examples, erased from memory by the final, bloody picture of the man? Leonard
had always supposed in his father an anger that became a poison and the poison
caused pain and its steady drip called for an end. But how big must a pain be
to also consume a wife and a daughter and a son? His old man was a young man
then, half Leonard’s age. He should’ve remembered how things change, how the
cold lifts and the desert greens and the humming birds come back. Leonard still
couldn’t see all the why of his father but he recognized a partial answer in
himself. The darkening was not pain but bone-deep numbness. Not nightmares but
short dreamless sleep and long wakefulness. Not chaos but an empty, unbudging sameness
that Inetta had been able to wave away whenever it gathered, but left alone
with it now, he was ready to roll to a stop.

The most reliable sign of spring in the Day Center—aside from the lack of bulky coats, knit hats and gloves—is the increased number of times the hair clippers are checked out. The front vestibule has a small mirror mounted on the wall and the heavily traveled floor is the one place we allow hair cutting.

Last week, three haircuts were given during my shift and a fourth was aborted after the guest cutting his own couldn't get the clippers to mow through his thick hair.

Yesterday JD, a tall, skinny wraith who walks with the sideways curl of a stroke, allowed his long white hair and beard to be taken down to the skin. Others who'd wintered with long hair came in looking clean cut, including one regular who, without his ubiquitous ball cap in place, might've passed for a banker.

I suspect the skinhead look is most popular, a long with a few mohawks, because it extends the time until the next cut. Also, the style is easy for volunteer barbers with limited skills—no trimming, evening or fades.

As you might imagine, not many of our male guests are highly invested in their appearance, and a radical change from time to time may even be advantageous for a few of them.

But the biggest reason may be that spring is also the time to find work.

Road work, construction and landscaping jobs come back with the warmer weather, and spring is a critical time for pruning the valley's vineyards and orchards so the vines stay healthy and the trees are shaped for efficient picking.

One new guest, fresh out of prison and living in the nearby mission shelter, was doing a phone interview for a job he'd found in the morning paper. A request for an in-person interview was complicated by the fact that he doesn't have a car and the work is in Palisade—a fruit-growing town about 13 miles away with what you might call spotty bus service to the local farms.

An additional challenge was the ankle monitor he must wear as a condition of his probation. He can't leave a proscribed area of the city without prior authorization—all of which he explained to the woman on the phone.

I know another man who found orchard work a few weeks ago. He's a firefighter on permanent disability from being caught in the collapse of a burning school building, and he's survived a bout with cancer. Shortly after landing the job, he was stricken with migranes that kept him awake at night in the overflow shelter. Last time I saw him a few weeks ago, he was walking like man trying not to spill a large bowl of water.

I haven't seen him here since, and I hope it means he's working.

James, too, was moving a bit gingerly. He's in his 50s. He'd spent Tuesday loading rock into a landscaping truck.

Wendell's portable workshop

Self-employment is another option, and last week Wendell was on the corner outside the Day Center making crosses to sell on the street near Wal-Mart and Chik-Fil-A.

His primitive crosses are made in all sizes from juniper and other scavenged wood that he carves, planes, sands and varnishes. His sign asks for Donations: $10-$20-$30. God Bless!

This winter he awakened one below-zero morning to severe pain in his left hand. He'd fallen asleep with a wet glove and three frostbitten fingers were starting to thaw. The first half-inch of flesh on the tips now looks like freezer-burned chicken dipped in cornmeal. He's awaiting to see if he can get by without amputation.

He tells me his crosses are in homes, yards and shops all over the valley and have gone overseas with tourists and accompanied soldiers to war zones.

Though he's lost the fine dexterity in his hand, it still works to hold the wood he's shaping and to clamp the finished pieces into a right angle.

Over the last several weeks, travel and working on developmental edits for Monument Road have kept me from posting, but not from making it down to the Day Center.

As usual, there's more than enough going on. We've had to ban a few guests for drug dealing and crack down on people leaving and coming back during the day. This is supposed to be a haven for those who want to get away from using and users—if even for a few hours—and we do what we can to keep it that way.

Most everyone—even the troublesmakers—will acknowledge the rules when they're enforced, but they stretch the hell out of them when they're not. As the guardian of the front door, I have to walk the line between treating people like adults and being taken of advantage of. Beyond the house rules themselves, the best tools at my disposal are respect and remembering names when guests walk in.

Last week, a guest sat out in the vestibule and played the house guitar for about an hour. He's a handsome guy, powerfully built, with a clear voice. On one song, I noticed he was working off the musical notation—not just tablature, which is for guitar players who can't read regular sheet music.

Back at the house I had a drawerful of Acoustic Guitar magazines I'd been saving the way some people save expired boxes of food. I wasn't going to use them, but they were too good to toss out. The covers featured all kinds of artists, ranging from Richard Thompson and Patty Griffin to Norman Blake and Keb Mo—as well as guitars well beyond the price range of a homeless man.

I asked MD if he was interested in them, and he responded enthusiastically.

Last night, during one of those quick fact checks that turns into a half-hour devoted to remotely related trivia, I ended up watching videotape highlights of my former high school's football team, which over the past two seasons had the most productive offense in the state and one of the best rushing offenses in the nation.

As an ex-footballer, I was curious about the no-huddle offense they ran and decided to check out a minute or two of video. I ended up watching for more than ten, as with deception and quick hand-offs, the team sliced apart the opposition as if the players were CGI renderings instead of real tacklers. One runner in particular found lanes and downfield blocking with the speed and grace of an Adrian Peterson. Of course, the video was edited to feature his long touchdown runs, but the supply of material seemed endless.

It was beautiful football that seemed to employ magic and dance instead of violence.

I knew the quarterback had won an award as the top player/citizen/scholar in the state, but who was that unstoppable No. 1? I looked him up and noted he shared a last name with the guitarist, and yes, a certain look around the eyes.

Today I brought in the magazines and had forgotten them until MD came in late to play the guitar. There were too many for him to carry away without a backpack, so he stowed most of them in his storage bin, where guests can secure belongings they can't leave in a shelter or camp. As he sorted through the pile, I asked if the running back was any relation.

He's my son, he said.

He's an amazing runner, I said.

Yes, he said proudly. He was one of the top running backs in the country. Now, I'm trying to get him healthy and ready to take advantage of the opportunities he has that I messed up.

He tried to talk to his son about his own mistakes, but the boy didn't want to hear it all, he said. He complained that the cops always showed up at his games. Why do they always come looking for you, he wanted to know.

Because that was the one time they'd know where I'd be, MD said.

I screwed up a lot of things for reasons that don't matter any more, he said. My boys are the best thing I've ever done and I want to be there for them. Back when I couldn't see them, I cried so much for my kids, my nickname was Cry Baby.

He smiled. You should see my youngest, he said. He's really going to be something.